1. Field of the Invention
This disclosure relates to a system and method for generating a business metric score for web pages reflecting a search engine rank of the web pages for a set of keywords and a business metric ranking function.
2. Description of the Related Art
Referring to FIG. 1, the World Wide Web (WWW) is a distributed database including literally billions of pages accessible through the Internet. Searching and indexing these pages to produce useful results in response to user queries is constantly a challenge. A search engine is typically used to search the WWW.
A typical prior art search engine 20 is shown in FIG. 1. Pages from the Internet or other source 22 are accessed through the use of a crawler 24. Crawler 24 aggregates pages from source 22 to ensure that these pages are searchable. Many algorithms exist for crawlers and in most cases these crawlers follow links in known hypertext documents to obtain other documents. The pages retrieved by crawler 24 are stored in a database 36. Thereafter, these pages are indexed by an indexer 26. Indexer 26 builds a searchable index of the pages in a database 34. For example, each web page may be broken down into words and respective locations of each word on the page. The pages are then indexed by the words and their respective locations.
In use, a user 32 sends a search query to a dispatcher 30. Dispatcher 30 compiles a list of search nodes in cluster 28 to execute the query and forwards the query to those selected search nodes. The search nodes in search node cluster 28 search respective parts of the index 34 and return search results along with a document identifier to dispatcher 30. Dispatcher 30 merges the received results to produce a final result set displayed to user 32 sorted by ranking scores based on a ranking function.
For each web page, hundreds of features are extracted and a ranking function is applied to those features to produce a ranking score. A merchant with a web page would like his page to be ranked higher in a result set based on relevant search keywords compared with web pages of his competitor for the same keywords. For example, for a merchant selling telephones, that merchant would like his web page to acquire a higher ranking score, and appear higher in a result set produced by a search engine, based on the keyword query “telephone” than the ranking scores of web sites of his competitors for the same keyword.
This disclosure describes an improvement over these prior art technologies.